"The Manifesto"

Apr 18 2010 ∞

“The Manifesto”

As a “Corporate Intrapraneur”, I’ve had a diverse set of roles and responsibilities throughout the first phase of my career and over the last 2 years, my interest in what’s going on within the emerging NYC Tech start-up scene has gone from a passive interest to a full blown focus as I continue to explore the implications of these developments on the “way things get done”. It’s hard to avoid sounding like “Captain Obvious” here, but we are in the early stages of experiencing change so profound and powerful that some experts are comparing what we’re going through today to the Industrial Revolution…pretty wild stuff!

“Allow myself to introduce…myself” - Austin Powers

My name is Alec Coughlin and I want to change the world by embracing the massively innovative technologies that continue to transform the way we live, learn and work.

The way I’m going to go about achieving such a “conservative” ;) goal is to put myself further out there than I’ve ever been to see who I might be able to persuade to come along for the ride. Here it goes…

Beginning with this “Manifesto” (as my friend/mentor behind this step refers to it), I’m going to share my story, ambitions, ideas, concepts and general perspective on an on-going basis through this channel to see if I might be able to engage a like-minded audience so that together, we can start making the amazing a reality.

Sounds a little lofty I know, but I’m a marketing guy who’s all sorts of glass half full when it comes to what’s possible inside of the Connected Economy we’re all now a part of. More on that kind of stuff later.

Before I go any further, let’s get into “The Story” to provide some context on who I am and why I’m so passionate about all things business and venture related.

“The Story”

I never really had a choice on this one and by that I mean, I was born this way, with this Entrepreneurial DNA, mindset etc that’s always on, always thinking, about business ventures, about challenges/opportunities, motivations, ideas, how to make things better etc. I don’t want to go to far into the “Born vs Made” conversation but this DNA and ambition of mine showed up early and often…

I grew up on the mean streets of Greenwich, CT (take a look at this legendary “Tea Partay” video where Greenwich gets a solid plug 46 seconds or so in…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0). It’s the kind of place that has a significant and well earned reputation due to a pretty outrageous resident population of big time hitters (more on that later when it comes to the importance of networks) who directly/indirectly played an important role in developing my ambition but I’m one of those annoying people that is the first to try and move the conversation into how “special the town is due to its incredible character, history etc etc” with sacred places like “Tod’s Point” - that’s where my wife said yes to spending the rest of her life with me…so when I say sacred, I mean it! ;)

As I said before, my entrepreneurial DNA showed up early and often. This is probably a good place for an example…

When I was a kid, I might have had a friend who’s father was an entrepreneur who did business with China. When we were 8 years old, he might have taken us into Chinatown just before the 4th of July to buy some “entertainment inventory” for the upcoming festivities. And a couple weeks later, I might have seen this as an opportunity build a healthy little business and decided to start sneaking into NYC by myself to acquire my own supply of “entertainment inventory” and then distribute them out in Greenwich, earning quite a significant margin. But then again, maybe I didn’t do that…thanks to Guilliani and how he went about cleaning things up in places like Chinatown, I don’t need to worry about my 9 year old brother following in my ridiculous footsteps because that kind of stuff is real hard to come by in these parts now.

So for me, it’s always been about becoming a Serial Entrepreneur and very early on I decided I should probably “cross-train” as much as possible to get myself ready. In life, work and experiences in general, I figured the more I could expose myself to, the better my chances of success down the road.

So after graduating from Greenwich High School, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to the University of Southern California. Initially, I was drawn to USC to get myself out of my East Coast comfort zone (a big thanks to BC for rejecting me because that would have really pulled on my East Coast’ness in a major way) but what really closed the deal was when I heard from alumni that it’s also referred to as the “University of Strong Connections” because of the tremendous amount of alumni networking and venture building that goes on after graduation…SOLD!

Oh yeah, and just to get ahead of any of my UCLA buddies that are going to jump in here and take a shot at USC…yes, USC is referred to as many other things including the “University of Spoiled Children” but that’s just standard little brother trying to pick a fight with big brother type stuff, we at USC are used to UCLA’s funny stuff…

Anyhow, being an alumni now, I know EXACTLY why once you’re a Trojan, you’re always a Trojan. I won’t go down that path because it’s only relevant for USC’ers…but you know EXACTLY what I would say if I did start evangelizing USC! Talk about a lucky break, I had NO IDEA what level of awesomeness USC was all about until I got there…

While at USC, I worked at the on-campus bar Traditions starting my Sophmore year. In a way, Traditions was the lab for all the business theory I was learning in the classroom as a Finance major. We worked hard, played hard and learned a whole lot about business fundamentals in that environment. People tend to downplay certain types of experience (i.e. “oh, you worked in a bar (insert eyes rolling visiual)”) but I think those same people tend to underestimate the importance of fundamentals in general such as customer service, culture, marketing, leadership, operations etc in building businesses of any kind…more on that stuff later when Tony Hsieh, Richard Branson, Zappos, Virgin, “Mavericks at Work” etc come up.

So back to accelerating my exposure and experience. Here’s a quick summary of my path and what I’ve been involved with so far.

1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta

AT&T Global Olympic Village
6/7 days & 80-90 hours per week of manual labor…little bit of a wake up call on the difference between manual labor and other less “intense” kinds of jobs
Yep, the experiential marketing space we built was were that bomb went off
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/July-August-08/On-this-Day—Bomb-Explodes-in-Atlanta-s-Olympic-Park.html
I was sitting on the bench next to where it was placed..and left 10 minutes before it went off which to this day still kinda freaks me out…

Tommy Hilfiger

Lucky for me, Tommy decided to dock and cruise around in his gorgeous Hacker Craft boat in the Long Island Sound - http://www.hackerboat.com/
Because he was using a fresh water boat (salt eats the wood finish) in the ocean, that translated to an amazing opportunity for me…
Managed and maintained the boat for a couple summers while getting to know a tremendous American entrepreneur

Banc of America Securities, Investment Banking & Trading

After running Traditions at USC, I got a little ahead of myself aka thought I could do no wrong…then I graduated in 2001, landed a job working on BofA’s trading floor in San Francisco and had my whole world rearranged(much needed)
Working market hours, I was on the trading floor by 430am everyday, getting beat up pretty good as I learned a “new language”, went through 9/11 etc…
Needless to say, this was just the type of 18 month “education” I needed and reminded me how important creativity is a component of my work…

Octagon

If IMG is the Goldman Sachs of the Sports Marketing Industry, Octagon is the Morgan Stanley
I can’t say enough about Octagon, what an INCREDIBLE place to learn the business of Sports Marketing
Working in one of Woody Thompson’s groups aka “THE MAN” (yes Woody, you are most definitely the man!!), I worked on the “MasterCard Priceless Edge Experience”
The “PE” revolved around a program we built where 100 student sweepstakes winners were taught the ins/outs of the Music and Sports industries through a combination of theory/classroom and experience/practice in a variety of settings at Vanderbilt University and throughout Nashville
Cool fact - “Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy” was a song written during a class were the students learned how the songwriting process unfolds by working with Big & Rich(who were up and coming Nashville talent back then) who got “big” pretty soon afterwards

Rick Peterson, MLB Pitching Coach

Worked with a group to develop a business plan around how to mainstream the pitching philosophy of leading MLB/Oakland A’s pitching coach RP who was responsible at the time for creating the dominant Zito, Mulder and Hudson pitching staff as featured in Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball”
We weren’t able to overcome some obstacles tied to fundraising but an incredible first experience in the start-up direction
Cool “fact” - I think he’s going to play himself in the movie based on the book that’s coming out…but I’m not sure

Endeavor Marketing

There’s no way I’ll be able to “quickly summarize” this one and reflect the true nature of how OUTRAGEOUSLY important this experience was but I’ll try
Mark Dowley, former Chairman & CEO of Interpublic Sports & Entertainment Group, is an ANIMAL in the purest sense - beyond bright, huge ideas, enormously demanding, relentless, persuasive, a rainmaker etc etc
Moving from McCann Worldgroup/IPSEG to Endeavor to scale their Marketing group, I had the fortune of sharing a wall with him and functioned as a Swiss Army knife as he kept throwing me into the deep end time and time again to support various aspects of the agency’s rapid growth rate
Finance, Operations, Strategy, Creative, Talent, Research, Account Management etc…this was cross-training at it’s finest!
Sharing a wall literally and figuratively with MD allowed me to really understand what people mean when they describe these types of experiences as “drinking directly from the fire hose”…forever grateful for that and then some

STL Rams

While at Endeavor, I developed what has become a lifelong friendship with the world’s finest Sports Marketing Sponsorship Sales/Bus Dev executive, Bob Reif
While there isn’t nearly enough room here to talk about everything that makes Bob as incredible as he is, one of the most remarkable aspects of his approach has to do with what differentiates those that are “good” from those that are “great”…the concept of “I” vs “We”
Bob doesn’t think about credit, all he thinks about is team
He demonstrates everyday that when you stop worrying about “I” and focus on “we”, the amazing starts to become a reality
While at Endeavor as Management Consultants, we developed a competitive study/growth blueprint for the Rams business operations which translated into us becoming the club’s outsourced version of the Chief Marketing Office as we were responsible for leading the organization’s execution against the blueprint
Significant revenue growth, marketing innovation and accolades followed
Tying back to the cross-training theme, I was fortunate enough to be offered an opportunity to make the transition from consultant to employee by becoming the Rams VP of Sales & Marketing which was hugely important for my evolution as I learned to appreciate the differences and challenges presented by the “employee vs consultant” equation

Endeavor Marketing 2.0 & McCann Worldgroup

Returned to work with MD as he reunited with McCann Worldgroup
Originally worked on various aspects of his relationship with Live Nation before having the opportunity to be a part of the internal management consulting team MD established to create Worldgroup EXP at the request of legendary McCann Worldgroup Chairman and CEO John Dooner
Worldgroup EXP was created to evaluate if McCann Worldgroup’s massive global footprint of production studios could become more efficient in large part through the introduction of bleeding edge technology that could empower some pretty amazing collaboration
Needless to say, being involved in a global effort of this nature allowed me to understand how challenging the process of changing large, established, strong and legacy cultures can be
In the process, I was fortunate to meet and work with some amazing people including Carol Smith, Ken Gray, Mauro Cellore, Lee Daley, Naj Kidwai and others who will all come up in later conversations about Culture Change, Strategy vs Execution, Advertising Technology, Different Ways to Monetize Agency Intellectual Property, Social Business Software etc

Now that we have “The Story” out of the way, let’s get into the fun stuff.

At least once a week, I’m going to post stuff that I find interesting. Hopefully it will be interesting, engaging and useful…if not, well, I’ll keep working at it until it does become all of those things!

Here’s a sample of the kind of stuff that’s been on my radar over the last couple of months to give an idea of what to expect in the future:

“New York Isn’t Silicon Valley And That’s Why They Like It.”